MOG - Bernie's Posts

Saw this video this morning and it made me smile

Bernie — Sat, 24 Feb 2007 06:59:13 GMT

I challenge the geezer who made this to re-do the video with Vordhosbn by Aphex Twin as the music.

Love it.

The Answer?

Bernie — Thu, 05 Oct 2006 09:05:20 GMT

Aha!

In reference to my rambling post below, I think I may have found the answer... This is a plug-in for iTunes on Windows XP that allows you to listen to your music via mood. So... it's less random than a shuffle - but still gives you the variation that you need, which is why you listen to music in shuffle.

It's good so far, creating interesting playlists and I find that the 'mood-matching' works. Generally I start listening to a song that summs up my mood (like the fabulous Soldier Jane from Becks new LP) and it will build me a mix round this... When my mood changes I select a new song. All Good.

Last time I blogged about a plug-in Apple bought it and included it with iTunes 7, so watch out for this in iTunes 8!

Get it from www.thefilter.com

Shuffle or albums?

Bernie — Sat, 23 Sep 2006 14:00:15 GMT

Three years ago this week I left home for University, and in the process of moving out – ripped all of my CD collection to my iMac HD via iTunes. It seems to be quite a poignant moment for me, disregarding all the money I had spent on albums in my childhood and giving them to my sister. Since then I’ve kept my music completely digitally, preferring to download rather than buy new albums because the irritating cheap plastic covers get stood on (you should see the battered Leftfield case in my spare room – plastic shards everywhere.)

Having an enormous amount of digital music on tap at the press of a button is obviously an absolute joy, but I’m constantly at battle with myself over how I should enjoy it all? Do I patiently listen to all the albums like a proper music fan, or press the big shiny shuffle button and skip any tracks that I don’t like?

These days most new bands will get signed on their ability to produce cracking singles, and therefore achieve radio play and rotation on MTV and other such things. There isn’t a recent record in the RS top 200 except for U2’s All that You Can’t Leave Behind. From most of the recent ‘good’ albums I’ve bought by bands such as Islands and Broken Social Scene, I’ve fallen in love with a couple of tracks – but haven’t been able to grasp the album as a whole.

When listening on shuffle mode I have developed a growing appreciation for Elliott Smith, a songwriter who writes fantastic individual songs – but when all these songs are played one after the other don’t have the same incredibly strong effect.

Shuffle certainly helps me consume the most amount of music in such a short amount of time, but really – it can’t be healthy. We’ve got artists and musicians slaving away in studios across the world and half of the people who get their record will only consume it via the random approach of shuffle.

Late last week, feeling I was cheating my music collection I decided to put on a whole album and listen to it. That album happened to be a double album. And it was... The White Album. It’s fantastic, and something I could have only enjoyed by listening it as a whole piece. If my music just shuffled onto ‘Piggies’ I would have probably gasped and skipped it onto the next song, cursing the shuffle button at being too random.

So, I’m going to undertake a highly scientific two week experiment. I’ve got a whole bunch of new music on my computer that I haven’t devoted enough time to listen to properly. So, for the whole of next week I’m going to listen to music only via shuffle mode and wait and count how many new artists and songs I end up discovering.

The next week I’m going to only listen to my music collection via complete albums, and write down every time I really dig an artist that I was unfamiliar before.

I think that I will enjoy the album experience more and manage to discover more artists, even though the shuffle mode should allow me to absorb the most music...

Here’s to science!

We Got A Hit

Bernie — Fri, 21 Jul 2006 09:14:45 GMT

With music I feel like a drug addict. I've been trying to stop downloading illegally for years, but then get stuck on massive binges on bit-torrent or YouSendIt.

Anyway. I'm currently 'clean' so went to the iTMS when I needed some new songs - and happened to see the new single by The Who - Wire and Glass.

I'm no massive Who fan - I do have Who's Next, but have never listened to any of thier rock operas or whatever but I was blown away by what I heard.

In my opinion its not in the slightest bit embarrassing for them, and matches up with my favourite stuff on Who's Next. It's great to hear music played with such passion and fire.

Wire and Glass is a short rock opera - basically five songs bunged together in a 7.5 minute bundle, and then the B-Side MirrorDoor closing the piece. At first listen, I wanted all the songs to go on for much longer - feeling like I was being cheated and listening to an album sampler or something. But once you get used to the format it is really rewarding. Full of different hooks, rhythms and feel in such a short time.

My favourite section is the fifth one, although unfortunately the fade out is really fast. I'm also not mad on the fake crowd noise on MirrorDoor.

Pete Townsend is such a fantastic song writer to be able to squeeze all these hooks together.

I presume it is Pino Pallidino playing bass - because it is sublime and melodic.

I think that Radiohead are currently locked away writing a rock-opera... that would be hot.

CoverFlow

Bernie — Thu, 13 Jul 2006 16:00:32 GMT

An essential plug-in for iTunes.

I've had a problem with iTunes recently, don't get me wrong I love it - but I often feel bored with my library and spend ages searching through it and ending up listening to the same album again (at the moment: The Eraser)

I'd recomend any of the mac crew out there to get this plug-in. It's called CoverFlow (www.steelskies.com/coverflow) and it allows you to flick through your music collection via the cover art. So, it's like flicking through vinyl.

It's really great and I've found loads of stuff that I had forgot about.

Oh, and Goo has such a great cover.

Nightmares in the Cinema

Bernie — Fri, 30 Jun 2006 12:57:36 GMT

Ho!

NME.com are reporting that there is going to be a Hollywood film about Jeff Buckley in the walk the line/Ray vein

KEANU REEVES TO PLAY JEFF!!!!!!

It needs to happen. Kanye West could even sample snippets from the film and relaunch Keanu's pop career (remember dogstar?)

Welcome to the Summer

Bernie — Tue, 27 Jun 2006 10:35:38 GMT

Ow! This album is hot. It's not even sunny outside, but I'm getting sunburn!

I know absolutely nothing about this band. Nothing. I guess they're American. And they sound like a really smokin' version of the Stones.

I'm in the process of making a 'Summer/Barbecue/Beer' mixtape and I can tell a lot of these tunes are going straight on it. This album is all about sitting in the garden with a can of beer, perfect.

I really think I've just discovered a band I'm gonna love. What a sound.

Any recomendations of other CCR albums I should check out?

MOG review draft.

Bernie — Tue, 27 Jun 2006 10:18:09 GMT

Okay... here's a draft version of a review of MOG I've been working on. If you've got anything to add about the site that you like, I'd really appreciate it if you could pop it in the comments below. Word.

MOG’s definitely a social-music-networking site for music connoisseurs. It’s homepage shows a list of 51 faces from the community and the music their currently enjoying. One lonely soul is currently enjoying ‘The Red Hot Chili Peppers’, who are currently Last.FM’s most popular artists in their global chart.

MOG is a very new contender to the social-music arena launching in June 2006. The site enjoyed it’s first burst of exposure when it was featured on delicious’ popular list, which would go some way to explain the sites mostly net savvy, blogging audience.

MOG is surely an acronym for Music-Blog, and this is clearly the main function of the site, with every user encouraged to blog about music and then providing a plethora of features such as widgets and listening charts to complement this.

Upon signing up to the website you are asked to download a 1MB ‘Mog-O-Matic’ a small device that sits in your System Preferences and sends out data based on your music listening. Encouragingly the software is not iTunes dependant, making it future proof, if people wish to use other software in the future or listen to music on a device such as a mobile phone unsupported by iTunes syncing.

Once the MOG-O-MATIC is installed it searches a determined music folder for your music files that it sends off to a server. For my modest 32 GB collection it took a grand total of around 8 hours, meaning I had to leave my computer on overnight. But a bonus is that MOG has compiled a digital library for me. Now I can point my friends towards my MOG site (Mog.com/Bernie) and they can flick through my entire music catalogue.

The Mog-o-matic also provides similar functions to audioscrobbler in that it sends off similar stats about your digital listening habits such as top songs and artists. MOG is slightly more customisable as it allows you to choose what charts appear on your page and also there are more charts to choose from.

I’m also happy to announce that the Mog-O-Matic works perfectly well in the background, unlike the clunky audioscrobbler that you have to tell to ‘update your iPod’ every time you plug your iPod in.

LAST.FM CHARTS:

Top Songs
Top Artists overall
Songs Weekly
Recent Tracks.

Mog Charts:

Recently Played
Top Albums This Week
Top Artists this week
Top Artists This Month
Top Songs this week
Top Songs this month
Recently Added to music collection
Top Albums this month

You can also customise the individual chart, choosing how many objects to show. This avoids the really long cluttered lists that appear on Last.FM. Because I’m more of an album person, more than someone who plays their whole library on shuffle I also opted to show the charts on top albums rather than top songs because I feel that this reflects my own listening habits better.

The MOG Philosophy.

Mog operates on the philosophy that a machine is no good at recommending music. They believe that when you get recommended an artist, chances are you've already checked them out. What the ‘MOG brain’ does is point you in the direction of people who have similar tastes to you. By clicking the 'find mogs like me' button at the top of your MOG, you receive a list of users with a similar musical taste. You can then read their posts and see what's been tickling their fancy - and it works pretty well.

The closest ‘Mog’ to me was an American named ‘exinicos’, who offered up a few decent recommendations via his ‘Songs you should be listening to’ widget, that featured several bands that I have been intending to sample for a while such as Tapes’N’Tapes and Band of Horses. His blogs were also of interest and in general the whole experience was far better than being recommended ‘Counting Crows’ (yuck!) by Last.FM

It is interesting to note that this recommendation service starts immediately, when using Last.FM I was disappointed to realise that it took several weeks of monitoring my listening habits before the recommendation feature kicked in.

The idea of ‘mans’ (analogue) recommendations being superior to the machine is arguably going to appeal to big music fans that look upon ‘analogue’ with misty-eyed nostalgia, with a love for vinyl and The Beatles. Incidentally, the site is decked with 60’s/70’s colours perhaps drawing attention to this.

Community recommendations also tie in with the key values and ethos of ‘Web 2.0’, which is sharing opinions and creating content to communicate with communities. Machine recommendations can be seen as ‘anti-community’. Why not use the community’s wealth of knowledge to drive recommendations rather than a computer database?

Blogging.

It’s clear that they are aiming this product at the growing blogging market, which isn’t necessarily a bad idea. A study by PEW American life has indicated that some 25% of Internet users read blogs. Blogging about music is also a relatively easy theme to introduce new people to blogging as it is fairly natural for a music fan to have an opinion about the music that they love or hate and MOG provides an interesting output for these opinions.

Due to the nature of blogging, you need to have relatively informed views surrounding music and need to be able to communicate effectively in writing. This immediately makes the service unappealing for someone without the time for blogging, or a casual music fan.

It is also not as universally appealing as a site such as MySpace, where people use the blog as a journal to talk about their day, rather than write arguments about the strength of the instrumentation on the latest ‘Band of Horses’ album.

To support your blog you can add ‘widgets’ to the layout of your MOG. Suggested Widgets range from ‘The first album I bought’ to ‘Concerts I’m going to see’. The true benefit of widgets lies in how they are customisable, and a quick tour around the MOG community shows people have created widgets to display ‘Top five albums to play every day’ and ‘favourite lyrics’. This feature alone makes a MOG page to be far more personalised and unique than Last.FM’s contrived and stale environment.

Complimenting the widgets, blogs and charts is a 'MOG-METER' rating your placing in MOG society. A new user will receive the rating 'Under the radar', where as a MOG veteran will be 'Smoking'. This is a great feature as it can act as a source of inspiration for the user who has just signed up.

MOG supports full RSS, so if you've already got a blog or website you can integrate streams from your MOG into it - Which provides a very good way of viral marketing for the website. Unfortunately they haven’t developed a script to go into people’s forum signatures, a feature of Last.FM that impressed me.

Design:

The MOG homepage features a ‘face-book’ of a selection of its users and what they are currently listening to. Again, this highlights the importance of the community to the site, but did originally send a confused message to me – I originally thought that they were artists or bands as opposed to users. The homepage also didn’t tell you how different the service was to Last.FM’s. I originally thought because of the similar theme and writing style that the website was targeting the same people and providing a copycat service.

Each MOG page is fully customisable, not only can you create your own widgets, but also you can move any element or chart and place it wherever you wish on your page.

Your page can also be ‘skinned’, and there is a selection of six high quality skins each designed by professional artists. Because there are only six to choose from, there is a degree of repetition to be found when browsing through mog.com, but because the quality is so high this is not a problem.

One of the major reasons myspace.com leapfrogged other social networking sites such as Facebook was due to its highly customisable interface. Any user could use basic CSS to alter the appearance of their page. Whilst this has resulted in many crimes against web design, it is very popular amongst users who want to create their unique page.
Summary.

This site is far more customisable and rewarding than Last.FM, but requires far more attention and time spent creating interesting widgets and writing blog posts. But you do actually feel part of a community, particularly because you can customise your page and make it different to other peoples.

Currently on this site there is a notable ‘elitist’ vibe, being that net savvy music connoisseurs mostly populate it. For example, you could immediately feel out of place if you listened to ‘top 40’ chart music.

Despite the added features that this site offers, I’m not intending to switch ‘allegiance’ from Last.FM to MOG. Instead I’m going to use both.

I’m going to continue to use Last.FM for my ‘official charts’ – showing the world what I’ve listened to each week, mostly because I’ve been using it for a good length of time so I’ve built up a decent history of my music habits. However, I am going to stop using the recommendation features and reading blogs on the site. Instead I am going to use these features on MOG.

I think it is a fault that there are no ‘global’ statistics for listening on MOG, it would be interesting to find out what the most listened to albums are, or the most recommended tracks of the day where.

Currently it is a very well designed site that caters for the indie music fans who is comfortable blogging.

Worryingly, there is no place to put your credit card. There is one small advert on each page. But unlike Last.FM there is no subscription option or any other way of getting income from its users.

Hope of the States

Bernie — Tue, 27 Jun 2006 09:29:51 GMT

The Lost Riots was a pleasure. It was an exhilarating, affirming ride. The album contained cracking singles like ‘Black Dollar Bills’, ‘Enemies/Friends’, ‘The Red The Black The Blue The Red’, and ‘Nehemiah’.

It was a special album, partly because they were one of the few leftfield indie bands that weren’t trying to sound like Radiohead. Also, the lyrics and themes of the album really pushed a button with me.

The album dealt with the helpless Americanisation of our (English) culture, yet he sang with an American twinge.

It also dealt with the human struggle, but in a positive way – telling us that together we can come through all of this mess. This was mirrored perfectly by Sam Herihly’s weak and crackled voice ending up victorious at the end of songs such as ‘Enemies/Friends’.

Today I bought ‘Left; Hope of the States’ second album from the iTunes Music Store.

It is the stalest, most void of emotion, useless offering I have heard this year. One of the special things about this band were that they were trying to do something slightly unique, now they just seem happy to be a 21st centaury Joy Division with a few orchestral ballads chucked in.

The title ‘Left’, must indicate that they feel that they have been ‘left’ behind by the British music scene who have ploughed onto more exciting acts like the Arctic Monkeys. They have been left behind. This was the wrong new direction to take. The Arctic Monkeys have shown that you need to get back to writing songs. With choruses. And hooks. Otherwise you won’t get played on the radio.

The production is cold and stale. And when they’ve tried to make this cold environment and then they’ve stuck a massive ‘orchestra’ behind it – it really doesn’t work.

To be honest, any big production effort with his voice in it is going to sound rubbish. They need to leave it rough and raw like on the previous album – and it really works because it makes their music sound very human. Left sounds very contrived.

On songs like ‘Forward Direction’, they’ve tried to repeat the forum of ‘Enemies/Friends’, with Pounding drums and a simple chorus. But it doesn’t work; the lyrics are cheap and thoughtless.

"I believe in love, I believe in Hope".

God it sounds like an Oasis lyric… Or worse a Christian lyric.

This is the first time I’ve ever hated a second album from a band I really liked. I wish I bought the thing from Fopp so I could take it back. I predict them being dropped by Sony, I’m not going to mourn for them – because they just can’t write songs anymore. Where are the lyrics, choruses and crescendos from The Lost Riots?

So: Two Albums to buy instead of ‘Left’.

1. A Silver Mt. Zion – "This is our punk rock" The Rusted Satellites Gather + Sing
2. Goodbye Enemy Airship/Landlord is Dead – Do Make Say Think

Here's A Thought.

Bernie — Mon, 26 Jun 2006 11:47:44 GMT

I was so excited about my first MP3 player. It was a 'soulmate' mp3 player. Had something like 32mb of space and played for about 30 mins before starting to make horrible noises and then dying. It then lost all its songs and it took about 30 mins to put the 20 songs back on via serial port.

Anyway, I still thought it was brilliant and I remember showing friends at school that it didn't skip, ever! Even when you jump into the lockers really hard!

That was about 1999. I was a youngster absolutely obsessed with Napster. I thought it was wonderful. I think that program is the main reason I have an interest in computers today.

Now in two double o six we've all got 40GB plus iPods and the data from our iPods is sent straight to sites like MOG and Last.FM where they gather all sorts of statistics about our listening habits. The whole world can nod in approval at the number of times you've span the Wire album, Or chuckle knowingly noting your guilty appreciation for Weezer.

There's been a huge leap in just seven years. So where's it going in the future?

Firstly I think we'll all have music subscription and access all our music via the internet probably using our mobile phones.

How else are they going to combat piracy? It's just too easy and too exciting to stop downloading for free. God, I really have tried. Firstly Napster was shutdown, so I moved from P2P service to P2P service. I finally gave up and uninstalled Limewire. I told myself I was going to buy vinyl - because then I wouldnt be tempted by digital... EVIL DIGITAL!!

But vinyl sucks. Come on. It sucks. And i got an iPod instead.

So then I started using Bit torrent. Despite breaking a condition i made to myself that I would never download a full album.

I used Bittorrent for about a year. I felt guitly as hell and stopped. I stopped for about six to eight months. And as I was a student could not afford to buy new CD's.

And what happened? Well I lost interest in music. I didn'y buy any concert tickets. Stopped buying music magazines. Stopped watching TV shows about new music. Whats the point if i can't listen to it?

I then started using forums where people recomend you music and send the YouSendIt file.

The reason I've started downloading music again is because I honestly think: What's the point in paying £7.99 for a CD when in a few years time I will be paying £10 a month to download unlimited legal music. It will just make my current investments null and void.

So... come on guys sort out a decent subscription service for Macintosh. I'll pay.